Why most prayers will actually make you feel worse than if you had not prayed at all…

or what you need to know about effective prayer

Does this sound familiar…

“Dear God, save me from the embarrassment of my mistakes at work. Don’t let my boss get mad at me or fire me.” Or “Dear God, please make my wife get off drugs so we can have a normal life again.” Or “Dear God, do something about Iraq – there’s so many innocents dying over there.” Or “Dear God, if you just get me through this mess, I’ll do anything you ask.”

We beseech God, we beg and we bargain. The trouble with most prayers is that we pray them hoping things we have already accepted as hopeless will miraculously turn themselves around. In the midst of chaos, and ruined lives, sometimes we feel that all we are left with is hope. So what’s wrong with that?

The trouble with hope

The trouble with hope is that it is one of the ego’s most trusted agents of pain and ignorance. And as long as we pray hoping things will change on the outside, we ensure that we will remain in pain and ignorance on the inside. It’s time to let hope go.

In order to do that, we must accept a fundamental idea about prayer: it does nothing to God – we can beseech, beg, and bargain all day and not change God’s perspective one iota and or make God more willing to put things the way we’d like to see them. That is because nothing we can say or do will make infinite Mind see an imperfection in order to change it. God sees only the perfection and wholeness that He created. Why should He change anything?

Prayer does nothing to God

While prayer does nothing for God, it does everything for the one praying if you can get out of hope mode. Done right, it changes consciousness from an ego-based starting point to a God-based one. It dissolves the negative patterns in consciousness, such as hopelessness.

The purpose of prayer then is not to bend God’s ear to take sides with our tribulations on Earth. The purpose of prayer is to align our mind with God’s mind and see things the way God sees them. If your mind is full of hope, waiting for a miraculous turnaround of hopeless external events, this can not happen. It’s time to let hope go.

What is Spiritual Mind Treatment?

We offer a form of affirmative scientific prayer we call Spiritual Mind Treatment which starts with the premise that there is one infinite good that we are a part of. We align ourselves with it and out of this center, we can know peace, health, love, joy, abundance, harmony and light in any situation.

This is not hope, this is certitude. This alignment with and acceptance of the Truth of All Life is what gives prayer its power. It is this alignment that will make you feel better that you did pray, and you will demonstrate results you could never dream of in hope. Dr. Ernest Holmes taught that there is a scientific reasoning underlying all prayer, and that through this process of reasoning we are treating our own mind about the subject of our prayer.

Dr. Stuart Grayson put it this way, effective spiritual mind treatment is "a flash of pure 'knowing'. This knowing, this breakthrough in awareness, is the truth that does the healing. At this point the problem goes; it automatically or spontaneously dissolves in this new awareness. You see a change in your experience, in your life.”

Take some time to come to class and learn how to pray affirmative scientific prayer for yourself and others. Then watch how good prayer makes you feel and how great it is to be alive!